The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared
In the mid-eighties the cheerful high school student vanished. After more than a decade had passed, her friends and family in her tiny North Texas hometown of Electra had no idea where she was—or if she was dead or alive. They certainly didn't know that almost two thousand miles away her fate was kept secret by a teenage girl named Brianna Stewart.
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How much Treva actually remembered about her past had become a topic of enormous interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. Some experts speculated that her past abuse from her uncle had been like a physical trauma, disconnecting memories in her brain. One professor of psychology said the abuse could have set off what is known as a "dissociative fugue," a type of amnesia in which she didn't know how she got where she was or why she was there. Others suggested she could have a multiple-personality disorder, in which she had created several personalities over the years to deal with her sexual abuse. A psychologist who had examined her for several days in 1995 when she was in Texas pretending to be Kara Williams was intrigued by her sincerity when she talked of satanic rituals and gang rape. "There was nothing in her behavior or presentation to suggest that she was knowingly misrepresenting the facts," the psychologist had written in his report.
What baffled everyone in Vancouver was her decision to give her fingerprints to the attorney. If she had been thinking rationally, she would certainly have known that the fingerprints would link her to Altoona. It was equally odd that, after her arrest, she demanded that her DNA be compared with the DNA of Carl and Patsy Throneberry. She said that she was certain such a test would prove she was not their child. (The DNA tests showed a 99.93 percent likelihood that she was.) And why did she try so hard to get people to look into her past, to discover her real identity? If she was deliberately trying to con people, why would she set herself up to be discovered?
There was little in medical or psychological literature that came close to helping the experts understand what had happened to Treva. "If it is what people think—a woman needing to go back to a certain age and relive it again and again—then it would be one for the books," said Kenneth Muscatel, a Seattle psychologist who had been hired by the court to examine Treva. "Here is a woman who invents stories to get the love and affection she had never known in her home, yet a woman so profoundly disturbed that she ends up turning on the very people who are trying to help her, accusing them of abuse."
Other than J'Lisha, no one from Treva's family tried to contact her after her arrest. Carl said he didn't write Treva because he had dropped out of school in the sixth grade and didn't know how to spell. He did want it known, however, that he was angry that "completely untrue stories" about Treva and his brother had made the newspapers. Patsy said she didn't write because she was still hurt by the way Treva had turned her back on the family. She did say that she believed that Treva hadn't forgotten about her entirely. At the funeral of her own mother, in 1998, Patsy said there was an elderly lady sitting at the back, wearing an old faded dress. The lady brushed against her as everyone was leaving the funeral parlor. Patsy noticed she was wearing a gray wig and granny glasses, and she had loads of pancake makeup on her face. "In my heart," she said, "I know it was Treva."
Treva's arrest did motivate her sisters to start talking to one another for the first time about their own feelings of shame about the past. But they didn't write Treva either. "We thought that maybe it would be best to just let her continue pretending to believe that she was a teenager," said Sue. "If she thought she was living in a better place, then so be it."
The prosecutor offered Treva a plea bargain—a recommendation of two years in prison in return for her admitting who she was. She wouldn't take the deal. She then fired her court-appointed attorneys when she learned that they were planning to argue that even though she was indeed Treva Throneberry, she had no idea she was committing a crime because she really did believe that she was Brianna Stewart. Treva told the judge that she wanted to exercise her constitutional right—which she apparently had read about in a law book at the library—to defend herself. She said she wanted to convince the jury that she truly was Brianna Stewart. "It is very important for me to clear my name," she said at a hearing. The judge could not say no. By law, to act as her own counsel Treva only had to demonstrate that she understood the nature of the charges against her and their potential punishment. Her nemesis, prosecutor Michael Kinnie, snarled to the press that Treva was perfectly competent. "She's graduated from high school at least twice," he said.
When Muscatel told the judge that he could not find sufficient mental problems to prove her incompetent, the stage was set for a disaster.
Vancouver, Washington—2001
HER TRIAL BEGAN IN MID-NOVEMBER, and each day, Treva shuffled into the courtroom, carrying a stack of law books and notebooks. Although she often kept her hair braided in her usual pigtails, she had traded her overalls for denim skirts that came down to her ankles. Before testimony began, she always smiled at Superior Court judge Robert Harris and said in her little girl's voice, "Hi." The esteemed judge was completely discombobulated by Treva. At one point he said, "Hello, Miss Stewart, Miss Throneberry, whatever."
He had one of her court-appointed attorneys sit beside her to answer any questions she might have about courtroom procedure and other points of law, but Treva seemed perfectly comfortable in her role as defense attorney. "Objection, relevance," she often called out, beaming at the judge. After several such objections, Kinnie, a serious, bearded fellow, began clenching his fists, trying to control his anger. When an investigator from the prosecutor's office took the stand and explained the complexities of fingerprint evidence, Treva nodded thoughtfully and, in her cross-examination, asked several rather pointless questions about ridge patterns on particular fingers. It was as if she were back in a high school science class asking a teacher how an experiment worked. Later, when another law enforcement officer told the jury about the way Keili Smitt in Corvallis, Oregon, used numerous aliases, she seemed mystified. "Why would someone come up with so many names?" she asked. "It makes no sense." This time, she turned and beamed at the jury. The officer just shrugged, staring at her.
Kinnie was so adamant about proving that Brianna really knew her true identity that he called to the stand a woman from a Vancouver convenience store. She said that she had remembered Brianna once coming in with some other teenagers to buy a pack of cigarettes and that Brianna showed an identification card with the name Treva Throneberry. The Evergreen teenagers who had been close to Brianna, however, were convinced that the clerk was lying. They said that Brianna never smoked, and no one could remember going to that store with her.
To further bolster his case, Kinnie had flown in Sharon Gentry, Treva's foster mother from fifteen years ago, to testify that she had known Treva in 1985, when she was sixteen years old. Gentry's unexpected appearance led to a moment in the trial that can only be described as heartbreaking. After she answered some perfunctory questions from Kinnie, Treva rose slowly from the defense table, approached the witness, and asked to see some photos that Gentry had brought with her. For the first time Treva seemed ill at ease. She stared at the photo of herself and Gentry on the beach at Port Aransas for spring break, then she stared at a photo of herself with the high school boyfriend from Wichita Falls who had taken her to Six Flags. After a long silence Treva said, "This Treva in these pictures. What was she like?"
Gentry glanced around. She wasn't sure what to say. "She was a very polite young lady," she finally said. "She enjoyed church. She enjoyed tennis. She had a wooden tennis racket. She was always very appropriate, very thankful. She always apologized if she hurt my feelings."
There was another long silence. Treva stared down at her notebook, her eyes blinking. Was it possible that the past was returning—that she was remembering the girl she once was?
"Was Treva smart?" Treva asked.
"Oh, yes. She loved to read and really enjoyed school activities. She made good grades."
Another silence. "Did she work hard?" Treva asked.
It was clear that Gentry was now struggling to control her emotions. She would later say that she almost stood up at that moment and leaned across the witness box so that she could wrap her arms around Treva. "She worked very hard," Gentry said. "She tried hard. Treva was a wonderful young woman."
"Oh," said Treva. "Thank you."
As the trial hurried to its conclusion, Treva presented little evidence to counter Kinnie's case. She attempted to introduce a report from a therapist in Vancouver who had once guessed that Brianna Stewart was about twenty years old, but the judge ruled the report inadmissible. She called her former teachers and counselors to the stand to testify that she had only wanted a Social Security number so that she could continue her schooling. "I wanted to go to college so I could take care of myself, isn't that right?" she asked her former Evergreen counselor, Greg Merrill. "And not have someone take care of me?"
"All of our conversations were about you being self-sufficient," Merrill replied stiffly, obviously embarrassed that he had believed Brianna's story for so long.
In his final argument Kinnie was merciless. He loomed over the jurors and said, "If you feel sorry for her, we don't give a damn about your tears. That's not why we're here." He then mimicked Treva's voice, telling the jury that she just wanted to remain a "pampered child" and that she wanted a free financial ride.
For her final argument Treva stood before the jury and read a short speech that she had handwritten in one of her notebooks. "I still say I am Brianna Rebecca Stewart," she said, polite as always. "I don't pretend to be anyone else but me."
It was a slam dunk of a case, of course. The jury quickly found her guilty, and the judge sentenced her to three years in prison. The attorney who had been assisting Treva, Gerry Wear, made a last-minute request for the judge to state for the record whether he thought that Treva was competent to stand trial. "There's no question in my mind, having spent as much time with her as I have, that she is of the opinion that she is Brianna Stewart," Wear said. But it was too late. Judge Harris said he wished he could send her to a state hospital for treatment, but his only legal option was prison. The problem with prison in Washington State, he admitted, was that there were limited mental-health services available for inmates. Nor was there any supervision for nonviolent offenders after their release. When Treva completes her sentence, she will be sent out the front door with a little money and perhaps a phone number for a women's shelter. And without any help, her cross-country odyssey might very well resume.
Treva told the judge she would immediately file an appeal. Before she walked out of the courtroom for the last time, she looked out a window. Rain was beginning to fall outside. With no wind, it came down in a sprinkling whisper, little drops flicking through the last of the maple leaves hanging on the trees. "It's so unfair," she said. "It's so unfair."
A reporter standing nearby said, "What's unfair? Are you talking about what happened to you a long time ago?"
She looked at the reporter quizzically, then she gathered her law books and sheets of paper. "My name," she said, "is Brianna Stewart, and I am nineteen years old."
As bailiffs led her into an elevator, she said once again, in a much louder voice, to the crowd who had gathered to see her, "I'm nineteen! I'm not guilty of anything except being a teenager!"
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